#NashvilleCMT Recap (Spoiler Alert)

Remember all the Scarlett baby daddy drama last week on CMT’s Nashville? On Thursday night’s (July 6) episode, it was time to change the narrative.

And, man, did she changed it.

First Scarlett went to Highway 65’s Alyssa to tell her that since that gossip columnist Mackenzie wrote the tell-all story, all her fans hate her now.

“They don’t hate you,” Alyssa told Scarlett. “They have a fantasy about you, and they were shocked to find out that you’re a real person. How dare you? That’s celebrity culture.”

And together, they brainstormed ways to turn the scandal into something positive, like doing a surprise pop-up show just for her fans who love her the most. That’s where Scarlett met Nadine, who was legit ticked off that Scarlett and Gunnar broke up.

That led to Scarlett telling off Mackenzie with this: “Your article made it seem like I had something to be ashamed of, and girls have enough shame heaped onto them every day.”

Later that night, Scarlett friended Nadine on Facebook and asked her to meet for coffee. When they met, it was pretty obvious that it was going to take more than a latte to wash the chip off Nadine’s shoulder. And what Scarlett did next was better than any publicity stunt Nashville could ever orchestrate.

She invited her teenage fans, including Nadine, to come to a little group therapy session to talk about the shame they all have in common. She went first, admitting that when she was in her teens she weighed roughly 14 pounds and had a lazy eye.

“People gave me hell about it,” she said. “I shamed myself for being shamed. I thought I deserved it. Inside, I’m still that little girl. If I’d had somebody to talk to, maybe life wouldn’t have been so lonely.”

After that, the teenagers start to open up one by one. And Mackenzie — the journalist we love to hate — showed up, too, with a sob story about the year she had to wear a back brace.

Things were not going quite as smoothly for Will. When he was at his shoot for the new Budweiser commercial — where he played himself but also a save-the-day kind of cowboy with a message of inclusiveness — he discovered that his boyfriend Zach had a sideline. And a guy named Jeff was calling him on it.

“Who are you, Zach?” he asked. “Why do you have different cell phones?”

But Zach has a perfectly good explanation. Jeff is merely “a guy who loves me.” But since Zach was so afraid of losing Will, he called Jeff on speakerphone so Will could hear and told him it was so over. It was nice to see that Zach isn’t always the boss.

Over at Highway 65, though, he was absolutely the boss. Which meant he was pressuring Deacon to sign his old friend Jessie. But like every pretty woman who walked into his post-Rayna life, he was suspicious. He took Jessie out for coffee, and she gave him her whole bad-marriage song and dance.

“Isn’t it scary when the whole world says you’re one thing and you know you’re not?” she told Deacon. “My mistake was being a coward and staying in a marriage that I knew was irretrievably dead.” And that’s why her music is so raw and personal.

So Deacon may or may not sign Jessie, but like he told Alyssa over dinner, he isn’t sure about much at work.

“Honestly, I’m just a guitar player,” he said. “In my wildest dreams I never imagined I’d be running some company.”